Two Merge so far...

Posted by Shaifali's Blog on January 17, 2015

Up till now I have completed first step of my task/project as an Outreachy(OPW) intern and now I am working for second step. It is an awesome experience, asking stupid questions, loads of learning, writing open source code, making new friends who are far away. Here I am briefing about few of these points:

Keep asking questions

I got to know about a popular phrase “There is No such thing as a Stupid Question”. And this is true! its okay if you feel like you are asking a stupid question, the person on the other side understands our desire of getting knowledge and most of the time, will satisfy with good answers. I think this is the power of Open Source and Free software communities, they are always willing to help and answer your questions. But at the same time, I believe it is always a good practice to google your questions first(GIYF) before asking, this will save their time and thus will allow them to write more code for the betterment of society. And secondly from Google you can easily gather upper level of knowledge, after which if you will ask, the probability of having a detailed discussion with an expert will increase and thus you will learn even more.

Learning new things

While reading Zaqar’s(OpenStack’s component) code, collaborating with OpenStack community, asking stupid questions and writing open source code, I got to know about @property decorator which help in making private variables inside a class. Well explained here. I have learned about a build tool Maven that is used for OpenStack docs, Debugging in python using pdb, python Mixins amazing feature about which I still need to learn more, httpie. The best is I got to know various hidden power of git, git bisect, git rebase, git visualization etc. And finally decided to read more about git, to know about its rest other powerful features. Truly, I become a fan of git. It was dam interesting to know about git bisect.

Its really great to know and learn about various common, old yet very powerful and exciting features of tools/software/technology you use daily. Truly said, ‘knowledge is end less’, the deep you go the more you will realize that yet there is a looooooog path to move on!

Tips for future inters:

Don’t be timid or feel shy or scary in asking questions. If you ask a question it makes you look stupid for 5 minutes - but if you don’t ask - you stay stupid for fifty years, so always ask questions in your life.